Project Catalyst Working Group in Nairobi

Cardano and Project Catalyst have been in Kenya for a while now, since our fund 7 funded proposal, “Cardano Blockchain Lab in Kenya.” Efforts like DirectEd and IOG’s RealFii have generated additional interest and investment in the region. It was no surprise then that Nairobi got picked as one of the physical locations to launch Fund 12 and host an in-person working group session. I was fortunate to attend in person. The two-day event was filled with lots of hard work, learning about blockchain for the first time for many, an impromptu blockchain meetup and new potential life-long connections.

To learn more about the global events and the new Catalyst Working Group (CWG) effort, see our recent article https://www.lidonation.com/posts/catatalyst-fc-12.

The Nairobi CWG event kicked off on the 25th of May, 2024. Anticipating that many attendees would need some background on Catalyst, and even blockchain entirely, Joy, the host, planned a two-day affair. On the first day, guests got a primer on blockchain, Cardano, and Project Catalyst. People were genuinely excited and curious about the potential of all of it.

Our working group session was tasked with workshopping Funded Project Incubation and Acceleration. We split up into teams of 4 or 5 with an assigned leader and scribe. Each team went through structured discussions of about seven questions. We were challenged to think about actionable outcomes for each question. Within each team, responses were ranked by vote. All responses from each team were combined and voted on by the full group.

The host made sure to include a Cardano veteran in each team to help explain new concepts to the 8 participants who had heard about Cardano once or less. Fortunately, long-time Lido Nation collaborators and consistently active Cardano veterans were in attendance:

• Cardano Ambassador & Educator from Cardano Africa Academy: Jeremiah Baani
• Cardano Ambassador & Education @lidonation: Darlington Kofa (That’s me!)
• The Catalyst Team’s Community Manager: TK Prince
• Cardano Ambassador & Entrepreneur from uptodatedevs & adaex.app: Dan Baruka
• COO & Software Engineer at adaex.app: Josephine Ndeze

The final output from the Nairobi and global working group sessions will be posted to https://catalystwg.gitbook.io/docs/v/outputs when all sessions are completed.

The final votes and the CWG session concluded by 2 pm on the 26th. Because there were so many first or recent comers to the Cardano ecosystem, by popular demand, I led a Cardano Africa Academy workshop: Exploring Blockchain Potentials & Opportunities: A Cardano Perspective. During the workshop we started with Google, what is blockchain, discussing it as a group. We were all amused to learn that a ledger is a flat stone slab covering a grave. We toured the cardano roadmap and ecosystem.

Everyone was engaged the entire time and had lots of questions. The workshop concluded with everyone creating a wallet, transferring their Seed phrase to another wallet, participating in the Lido Nation Every Epoch quiz, and withdrawing the associated rewards to their newly created wallet.

By 5 pm it was dinner time, and our time in the building was up. I was awestruck to learn that the event host knew nothing about Cardano 6 months ago; she was only recently onboarded by Cardano Ambassador Jeremiah Baan. We met up for drinks and choma (Kenyan-style BBQ) at a local pub later that evening and dreamt of regular in-person meetups.